One of the interesting things about living deep in central Kentucky is our proximity to several really large Amish / Mennonite communities. Hose and buggies traveling through town, headed to a local hardware shop or grocery store is a pretty common sight around here.

About a year ago we made some friends with a few guys in a community about 30 minutes outside of town, and discovered they had built their own iron foundry, where they make various farm tools / wood stove parts / and other implements themselves out of welted and poured iron. If you have never seen a bunch of Amish / Mennonite guys pouring a giant vat of melted metal into a mould, well… it’s a memorable sight to say the least.

When you spend your days thinking of and designing products, and discover that you suddenly have access to a homemade iron foundry you can’t help but get excited and start racking your brain for an idea of something to make. And when you’re Kentucky Home, a Kentucky shaped frying pan is the idea you have! After a lot of trail and error we designed our pan with the help of a 3D designer in Canada, and 3D printed into plastic a prototype mould to use at the foundry. With that we sand cast the plastic mould to make a hollow form to pour the molten iron in, and a few days later our first “Bluegrass Foundry” frying pan was made.

We found that we errored a little in making it much thicker than it needed to be, so the first attempt weighs an absolute ton, but we were thrilled to death with how it turned out overall. While the pans might not become an actual Kentucky Home product on Amazon, it is a really fun side project and we’re really excited to refine the design a bit and try out a few more!